1. Amen, which includes the meanings truth, firmness, firm ground, ground, and furthermore the meanings loyalty, to trust, entrust oneself, take one's stand on something, believe in something; thus faith in God appears as a holding on to God through which man gains a firm hold for his life. Faith is thereby defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God..."If you do not believe, than you do not abide." "If you do not believe (if you do not hold firm to Yahweh), then you will have no hold" (Isaiah). 39
2. Belief operates on a completely different plane from that of making and "makability." It cannot be "laid out on the table." Essentially, it is entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself and never could be made, and which precisely in this way supports and makes possible all our making...The penetrating "perhaps" which belief whispers in man's ear in every place and in every age does not point to any uncertainty within the realm of practical knowledge; it simply queries the absoluteness of this realm and relativizes it, reminding man that it is only one plane of human existence in general, a plane that can only have the character of something less than final. 40
3. Belief does not belong to the realm of what can be, or has been made, but to the realm of basic questions which man cannot avoid answering and the answer to which can by its nature occur only in one form. Belief...There is a realm which allows no other answer but that of entertaining a belief, and no man can completely avoid this realm. Every man is bound to have some kind of "belief." 41
4. Believe is...a way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable by knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man's calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up...Without the word, without meaning, without love he falls into the situation of no-longer-being-able-to-live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance. 42
5. Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received. 43
6. To believe as a Christian...means affirming that the meaning which we do not make but can only receive is already granted to us, so that we have only to take it and entrust ourselves to it. 43
7. Christian belief is the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making--[without reducing the value of the making]. 43
8. That what cannot be seen is more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which bears us up and hence enables us to face the visible in a calm and relaxed way--knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things. 43
9. [It] is not a blind surrender to the irrational. On the contrary, it is a movement towards the logos, the ratio, towards meaning and so towards truth itself, for in the final analysis the ground on which man takes his stand cannot possibly be anything else but the truth revealing itself. 44
10. The Christian act of faith intrinsically includes the conviction that the meaningful ground, the logos, on which we take our stand, precisely because it is meaning, is also truth. (The Greek word logos displays in its range of meanings a certain correspondence with the Hebrew root 'mn ["Amen"]: word, meaning, intelligence, truth are all included in its semantic range.) Meaning or sense which was not truth would be non-sense. 45
11. The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself;...only revealing itself in "standing": seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning which man has received as ground...[I]t is a characteristic of understanding that it is continually outstripping our capacity to apprehend and reaching out to a recognition of the way in which we are comprehended. 46-7
12. It is personal! The most fundamental feature of Christian faith or belief is its personal character. Christian faith is more that the option in favour of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not "I believe in something", but "I believe in Thee". It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences that meaning of the world as a person. 47
13. Jesus' life from the Father, in the immediacy and closeness of his association with him in prayer and indeed face to face, he is God's witness;...he is the presence of the eternal itself in this world. In his life, in the unconditional devotion of himself to men, the meaning of the world is present before us; it vouchsafes itself to us as love which loves even me and makes life worth living by this incomprehensible gift of a love free from any threat of fading away or any tinge of egoism. The meaning of the world is the "You", though only the one that is not itself an open question but the ground of all, needing itself no other ground. 48
14. Faith is the finding of a "You" that bears me up and amid all the unfulfilled....unfulfillable...hope of human encounters gives me the promise of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it. Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like a child that knows all its questions answered in the "You" of its mother. Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the thesis round which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion "I believe in You"--of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.
15. Darkness. "Are you really He?" (John the Baptist's question from prison to Jesus) The believer will repeatedly experience the darkness in which the negation of unbelief surrounds him like a gloomy prison from which there is no escape, and the indifference of the world, which goes its way unchanged as if nothing had happened, seems only to mock his hope. 48
16. We have to pose the question "Are you really He", not only through honesty of thought and because of reason's responsibility but also in accordance with the intrinsic law of love, which wants to know more and more him to whom it has given its "Yes", so as to be able to love him more...in the basic faith confession: "I believe in You, Jesus of Nazareth, as the meaning (logos) of the world and of my life." 49
Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger, New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.
_Painting_by_Philippe_-_(MeisterDrucke-1002935).jpg)
